Up Close With Lenovo ThinkPad T400s

The Lenovo ThinkPad T400s is the latest edition to the manufacturer's flagship line of notebooks. Featuring an Intel 2.53-GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 128 GB of solid state or 250 GB of hard disk storage, the ThinkPad T400s is designed for business users. The T400s was designed to deliver easy and intuitive use in a thin and light package for business-class employees.

Lenovo saw the prevailing trends and made sure to deliver on what customers are currently looking for in the notebook market: a powerful system that is thin and light. The T400s weighs around 4 pounds and measures about 0.83 inches thick at its widest point. Packed into that small form factor is a 14-inch LED display with its internal components protected by a monocoque carbon reinforced fiber roll cage.

In order to achieve the thin and light specifications that customers are looking for these days, many manufacturers are dropping DVD, Blu-ray or any type of optical drive from their laptops. Lenovo, however, made the decision to keep an optical drive. The ThinkPad T400s features a 9.5mm slim DVD burner or Blue-ray player. Lenovo decided to keep the drives because, in a business setting, not being able to access information simply because it's encoded on a DVD or CD-ROM isn't an option.

Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7 OS is highly anticipated across the industry. Any PC maker who is refreshing or introducing hardware needs to be prepared to have those machines run the next version of the operating system. Windows 7 includes support for multitouch capabilities and, incidentally, so does the Lenovo T400s. The touchpad is flush with the keyboard but has a textured feel to let users know when they are using it. Once the machine is loaded with Windows 7, Lenovo users will have access to all the multitouch commands that the OS supports right out of the box.

In designing the keyboard on the Lenovo T400s, the computer manufacturer listened to customer feedback. One of the things customers told Lenovo was that they often ate lunch in front of their machines. That led to crumbs accumulating in the keys of the keyboard over time. To help alleviate that problem, the keyboard on T400s has less space between the keys, which makes it more difficult for crumbs to infiltrate the system. In addition, Lenovo found that users were hitting the Escape and Delete keys constantly at work. The company listened to customers and increased the size of those keys on the T400s, providing a bigger landing zone for users to hit.